Questioning Official Environmentalism
11/8/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Questioning Official Environmentalism
Source: Z Magazine
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 8, 1999
Byline: Brian Tokar
Seven years ago in these pages, we launched an in-depth investigation
of the mainstream environmental movement. The occasion was the widely
publicized 20th anniversary of the original Earth Day, an event which
in many ways helped institutionalize the widespread corporate co-
optation of environmental themes.
The year 1990 was an auspicious one for environmental activists in
the United States. The widespread popularity of environmental
concerns was reflected in the rapid growth of environmental
organizations, the appearance of new publications, and some of the
first glossy catalogs of environmental products. Expressions of
concern for the environment adorned politicians' stump speeches, both
in the U.S. and overseas. Environmental scientists and activists
widely agreed that the 1990s were a critical decade to stem the
course of environmental degradation, and political and cultural
trends offered many people a renewed hope that this was possible.
Still, the coming Earth Day celebrations aroused a curious mixture of
hope and cynicism on the part of long-time activists. The cynicism
was fueled by much of the literature emanating from the official
Earth Day organizations that had been established throughout the
country. They had apparently decided that Earth Day was going to be a
politically safe event, with almost no attention toward the
institutions or the economic system responsible for ecocide, nothing
about confronting corporate polluters, nothing about changing the
structures of society. The overriding message was simply, "change
your lifestyle": recycle, drive less, stop wasting energy, buy better
appliances, etc. Celebrations in several major U.S. cities were
supported by some of the most notorious corporate polluters-companies
like Monsanto, Peabody Coal, and Georgia Power, to name a few.
Everyone from the nuclear power industry to the Chemical
Manufacturers' Association took out full-page advertisements in
newspapers and magazines proclaiming that, for them, "Every day is
Earth Day." The now-familiar greenwashing of Earth Day had clearly
begun.
Activists across the country began exploring the origins of Earth Day
and also mainstream environmental groups that were making the most
hay of this anniversary. What they found was a mixed message: while
Earth Day had for many come to symbolize the emergence of
environmentalism as a social movement in its own right, it was
dominated from the very beginning by those who hoped to dilute the
movement's political focus. In 1970, Ramparts magazine, one of the
New Left's leading journals of opinion, called Earth Day, "the first
step in a con game that will do little more than abuse the
environment even further." Journalist I.F. Stone, in his
investigative weekly, took a significantly harsher view: "...just as
the Caesers once used bread and circuses so ours were at last
learning to use rock-and-roll idealism and non-inflammatory social
issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might
really threaten the power structure."
Many activists responded by organizing more politicized local Earth
Days of their own. These events focused on local environmental
struggles, inner city issues, the nature of corporate power and other
concerns that had been largely excluded from the official Earth Day
events. The most ambitious was a demonstration in New York City
called by members of the Youth Greens and Left Greens, with the aid
of environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers, ecofeminists,
urban squatters, and many others. Early Monday morning, April 23,
1990, the day after millions had participated in feel-good Earth Day
commemorations, several hundred people converged on the nerve center
of U.S. capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange, with the goal of
obstructing the opening of trading on that day. New York Daily News
columnist Juan Gonzalez told his 1.2 million readers, "Certainly,
those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into a media and marketing
extravaganza, to make the public feel good while obscuring the
corporate root of the Earth's pollution almost succeeded. It took
angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall
Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs."
Challenging the Mainstream
The events around Earth Day 1990 helped provoke an unprecedented
scrutiny of the habits and institutions of environmental politics in
the United States. Growing numbers of activists began to see the
best-known national environmental organizations, which had long
dominated media coverage, fundraising and public visibility-the
voices of "official environmentalism"-as hopelessly out of step with
the thousands of volunteers who largely define the leading edge of
locally based ecological activism.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, representatives of environmental
groups, from the National Wildlife Federation to the Sierra Club, had
become an increasingly visible and entrenched part of the Washington
political scene. As the appearance of success within the system
grew, organizations restructured and altered their personnel so as to
enhance their ability to play the insider game. The environmental
movement became a stepping stone in the careers of a new generation
of Washington lawyers and lobbyists, and official environmentalism
came to accept the role long established for other public regulatory
advocates: that of helping to sustain the smooth functioning of the
existing political system. Environmentalism was redefined, in the
words of author and historian Robert Gottlieb, as "a kind of interest
group politics tied to the maintenance of the environmental policy
system."
The mainstream groups grew especially rapidly during the late 1980s.
The Sierra Club grew from 80,000 to 630,000 members, and the
conservative National Wildlife Federation reported membership gains
of up to 8,000 a month, totaling nearly one million. The World
Wildlife Fund, best known for its efforts to establish national parks
on the U.S. model in Third World countries, grew almost tenfold,
while the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) had doubled its
membership since 1985. The total budget of the ten largest
environmental groups grew from less than $10 million in 1965, to $218
million in 1985 and $514 million in 1990. Journalist Mark Dowie
discovered that of the approximately $3 billion contributed to
environmental advocates each year, the 25 largest organizations get
70 percent, while the remaining share is divided among some 10,000
smaller, more local groups. Many groups have become extremely
dependent on direct mail, using each new environmental disaster to
gain members for their organization, whether the organization was
meaningfully addressing the issue or not.
In light of these developments, activists began to investigate
environmental movement using the tools of corporate research. An
examination of the Annual Reports of the major environmental
organizations revealed an extent of overt corporate influence upon
the leading national environmental groups that surprised all but the
most jaded activists. Almost all of the leading groups were receiving
substantial contributions from the most polluting corporations. Many
had restructured their operations so as to become more attractive to
such donors, and the National Wildlife Federation, in particular, saw
"dialogue" with "key industrial leaders" as a central part of its
mission. Few were surprised when NWF later became the first U.S.
environmental group to support the North American Free Trade
Agreement.
Others began examining the boards of directors of the leading
environmental groups. The Multinational Monitor found that 23
directors and council members from Audubon, NRDC, the Wilderness
Society, the World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund were
associated with 19 corporations cited in a recent survey of the 500
worst industrial polluters. These companies included such recognized
environmental offenders as Union Carbide, Exxon, Monsanto,
Weyerhaeuser, DuPont, and Waste Management, Inc. Furthermore, some 67
individuals associated with just 7 environmental groups served as
CEOs, chairpersons, presidents, consultants or directors for 92 major
corporations.
Feminist environmentalist Joni Seager surveyed 30 leading
environmental groups and found that only three (the National Audubon
Society, Earth Island Institute, and WorldWatch Institute) had even
30 percent female members on their boards. Women, in most mainstream
groups, remain relegated to traditionally female administrative
roles, and none of 30 groups she surveyed had more than 5 staff
members from any racial minority. Seager described the widening
schism in the environmental movement as "increasingly between a
mostly male-led professional elite and a mostly female-led grassroots
movement." A widely quoted 1990 letter, initiated by Richard Moore of
New Mexico's Southwest Organizing Project and signed by 100 leading
community activists, criticized the dearth of people of color on the
boards and staff of the major environmental groups, as well as these
groups' growing reliance on corporate funding.
The Saga Continues
Today, analyses of the political and financial ties that have
corrupted mainstream environmentalism have become almost commonplace.
Mainstream journalists, business schools, and even anti-environmental
"wise use" organizations have published their own studies of
environmental groups finances, and have used the data to support
their own often questionable political agendas. As the largest
environmental groups came to resemble the corporations they opposed,
this kind of research found uses well across the political spectrum.
While grassroots activists view corporate contributions as a symbol
of co-optation, and of the dangers inherent in a strategy of working
entirely within the existing political system, those seeking to
discredit environmental protection see these contributions as
evidence for simple corruption, greed, and a cynical response to
changing public opinion. Anti-environmental advocates have
articulated a rather distorted theory of the decline of mainstream
environmentalism, asserting despite all evidence to the contrary that
the mainstream groups are bound to an "extremist" agenda which is at
odds with the views of a majority of the public.
For example, the Washington-based Environmental Working Group
reported in July of last year on the annual lobbying week of the
virulently anti-environmental Alliance for America. Amidst
presentations by oil industry lobbyists, property rights agitators,
and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was a talk by Jonathan Adler of the
well-endowed anti-environmental think tank, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute. Adler described his own version of a split
between "Big Green" and the "grassroots," in which dependence on
direct mail, foundation support, and government grants are signs of
dwindling "grassroots" support for an environmental agenda.
In 1994, the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington
University in St. Louis examined the established environmental
groups' stock portfolios, ostensibly developed as a hedge against
fluctuating memberships, and found that the Wilderness Society, for
example, held stock in Dow Chemical, Kerr McGee, and General Motors,
and the NRDC in Dow, Westinghouse, and General Electric. For
organizations committed to protecting the environment and combating
pollution to become financially dependent on the stock values of
major polluters may represent the ultimate corruption of ecological
values. The same study confirmed that membership dues represented an
ever declining share of the income of groups like the Wilderness
Society and National Audubon. But while the political influence
wielded by these groups has fallen considerably since the early
1900s, income and membership levels have in most cases only leveled
off, or continued to rise at a slower rate.
Though corporate contributions rarely represent a very large overall
share of the budgets of the best known environmental groups, they
have conferred influence and political results well beyond their
statistical measure. As Brian Lipsett, a leading researcher and
editor for the environmental justice movement has written, "The
corporations get a good return from their contributions to
environmental causes... Beyond public relations dividends and tax
deductions, and even increased business opportunities, corporate
sponsorship fractures internal consensus within recipient groups,
divides grantees from other environmental groups, blunts criticism
from grantee groups, and creates openings for future influence by
securing corporate representation on the groups' boards of
directors." This helps explain why corporations give to environmental
organizations at nearly two and a half times the rate of overall
public charitable donations to the environmental movement.
Environmental giving amounts to 6 percent of corporate philanthropy,
while it only accounts for 2.5 percent of all charitable donations.
My review of the 1993 and 1994 Annual Reports of some of the best
known environmental groups revealed a generally higher level of
corporate influence than existed five years earlier. For example, the
National Audubon Society, with similar budget totals and share of
member contributions as in 1988, had expanded its list of corporate
donors to include large gifts from Bechtel, AT&T, Citibank, Honda,
Martin Marietta, Wheelabrator, Ciba-Geigy, Dow, and Scott Paper, with
smaller donations (less than $5,000) from Monsanto, Mobil, and Shell
Oil. The Audubon Society's major capital project, the conversion of
an historic building in New York's Greenwich Village to a new Society
headquarters-and a showcase of energy efficiency and recycled
materials use-was supported by grants of over $100,000 each from WMX
(formerly Waste Management, Inc.) and Wheelabrator. The former is the
world's largest processor of toxic chemical waste, and has been the
subject of numerous bribery and anti-trust convictions, as well as
countless environmental violations. The latter is a leading supplier
of incinerator technologies that have been widely opposed by
activists across the country due to serious environmental and public
health concerns.
The World Wildlife Fund's corporate contributors are now led by the
likes of the Bank of America, Kodak, and J.P. Morgan (over $250,000),
with the Bank of Tokyo, Philip Morris, WMX, DuPont, and numerous
others playing supporting roles. Its budget grew from $17 million in
1985 to $62 million in 1993, with roughly half of its revenues coming
from individual contributions. The National Wildlife Federation's
budget had increased by more than 50 percent since 1988, to $96
million in 1994. Major corporate donors included Bristol Myers
Squibb, Ciba-Geigy, DuPont, and Pennzoil, and an additional 161
companies participated in the Federation's matching gift program, in
which individuals' gifts to the organization are matched by their
employer. Other organizations, such as the Sierra Club, have made
contributor information more difficult to obtain, but it is
noteworthy that their annual budget had leveled off at $39 million,
after peaking at $52 million in 1991. Membership dues had fallen to
32 percent of the Sierra Club's annual budget, half of the 1988
figure.
The Money Chase
One consistent factor in the institutionalization of official
environmentalism has been the role of influential foundations in
helping to frame the agendas of the leading organizations. Large
foundations like the Ford Foundation and the various Rockefeller
funds played a forceful role in the development of environmental
organizations since the 1940s, leading some 1960s activists to
dismiss environmental concerns as a mere creation of corporate
philanthropists.
Foundations often play a controversial role in movements for social
change. Organizations that wish to sustain themselves over time,
initiate new projects, and offer salaries to staff members invariably
need to attract large donations, and the established foundations have
long been the most available source of these. Political scientist
Joan Roelofs has demonstrated the role of foundations in the decline
of 1960s-era activism, arguing that grants were systematically
allocated to assure "that radical energies were being channeled into
safe, legalistic, bureaucratic and occasionally profit-making
activities." This pattern has been repeated in anti-poverty groups,
women's groups, and in the African American, Latino, and Native
American communities, as well as in the environmental movement.
In the 1990s, large donors have begun to intervene more directly to
set the course of environmental activism. For example, a $275,000
grant to the Sierra Club in 1990 to support work on population issues
made population advocacy the highest-funded program in the Club's
budget. This raised concern among activists who feared the effort
would inadvertently support the rising wave of anti-immigration
sentiment that was just beginning to sweep the country. In 1993,
officers of the Pew Charitable Trusts brought together
representatives from some of the leading regional and national forest
protection groups in an effort to create a unified nationwide forest
campaign. While the participants initially seized the opportunity to
help develop such a unified effort, they soon learned that Pew had a
very particular agenda in mind.
"Pew was only interested in funding a campaign focused on legislation
that would be passed by a Democratic Congress and that Clinton would
sign," explains Andy Mahler of the Indiana-based Heartwood
organization, who served as an interim chair of the effort. Pew
expressed little interest in aiding ongoing efforts at grassroots
organizing, public education, or legal intervention by the member
groups, suggesting to many that the potential effectiveness of the
campaign was merely a secondary concern.
Ultimately, Pew put its resources into a series of regional, rather
than national efforts. One of these was in the Northeastern states,
where a two-year Congressional study had failed to raise sufficient
political momentum for the protection of the endangered Northern
Forest region. Representatives of mainstream environmental groups
and leading foundations created the Northern Forest Alliance, with a
stated mission of protecting the forests of northern New England and
New York, while promoting economic diversification. Groups in the
region that depend on foundation grants were subsequently pressured
to join the Alliance, and mute their criticisms of its rather bland,
non-controversial, and rather piecemeal approach to the environmental
health of a region that is threatened with significant, short-term
increases in destructive logging and commercial development.
The 1994 Annual Report of the Pew Charitable Trusts, describes the
strategy behind these efforts. A "team of professionals," the report
declares, stands behind the Trusts' environmental programs. This
team, consisting of lawyers, scientists, and outside consultants,
will "play a key role in generating many of the ideas behind the
programs we support, participating with colleagues from the
environmental community in defining the goals and objectives of these
programs, designing their operating structures, hiring key staff and,
in some cases, being directly involved in program execution."
Investigative journalist Stephan Salisbury of the Philadelphia
Inquirer described the strategy of a growing sector of leading
environmental funders when he described Pew's having "created and
funded dozens of programs and independent organizations to carry out
agendas determined by the foundation and its consultants. It has
promoted its own causes, pursued its own initiatives, bankrolled its
own research and imposed its own order." Salisbury, writing in Pew's
home city of Philadelphia, examined the Trusts' increasingly
controversial activities in areas from journalism and school reform
to tourism marketing and restructuring local arts organizations, as
well as in the environmental movement. He described Pew's overall
philosophy as "professionalized, self-promoting corporate
liberalism."
In 1995, Northwest forest activist and journalist Jeffrey St. Clair
joined with Alexander Cockburn to investigate the stock holdings of
the three foundations that play the largest institutional role in
supporting mainstream environmentalism. The three foundations, each
the product of leading transnational oil fortunes, are the Pew
Charitable Trusts (Sun Oil Co.), W. Alton Jones Foundation (Cities
Service/CITGO), and the Rockefeller Family Fund. St. Clair and
Cockburn found that the Pew endowment, with a total of $3.8 billion
in holdings, is heavily invested in timber firms, mining companies,
arms manufacturers, and chemical companies, as well as oil
exploration. Alton Jones' timber investments include a subsidiary of
the notorious Maxxam conglomerate, which is attempting to liquidate
the largest single expanse of old growth redwood forest that remains
in private hands, along with Louisiana Pacific, the largest purchaser
of timber from the National Forests. The foundation also holds a $1
million share in the controversial gold mining giant, the FMC
Corporation. The Rockefeller fund holds investments in no less than
28 oil and gas development companies, as well as timber giants
Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade. St. Clair and Cockburn traced a
number of instances in which environmental compromises engineered by
the Clinton administration, and by groups such as the Wilderness
Society, directly benefited these foundations' holdings.
The Nationals Respond
The mid-1990s saw the beginnings of a shakeup at the top among some
of the largest Washington-based environmental groups. In some cases
it was a response to persistent grassroots criticism; more often it
was a reflection of the persistent decline in the influence of the
environmental movement in Washington. This loss of influence began
well before the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and has been
exacerbated by the Clinton administration's often duplicitous
approach to environmental policy. Some of the mainstream groups have
made concerted efforts to cast their efforts in more grassroots
terms. For example, when environmental lawyer Mark van Putten assumed
the position of CEO of the National Wildlife Federation in 1996, he
described his mission as one to "reinvigorate the real roots of the
conservation movement."
The Wilderness Society also chose a new top officer in 1996, and the
Sierra Club elected a 23-year-old activist and founder of the Sierra
Student Coalition as its new president. The Sierra Club has
gradually, though often reluctantly, strengthened its positions on
some issues of primary concern to grassroots Club members. A five-
year campaign by Sierra Club members to press the Club to take a
stand against all commercial logging in the National Forests
culminated in a 1996 membership referendum that passed by a margin of
2 to 1 in favor of the proposal. This despite the opposition of some
notable Sierra Club board members, including Earth First! co-founder
Dave Foreman, who condemned the Club's "true believers who hold onto
some idealistic notion of no compromise," apparently with little
intended irony. Spurred in part by widespread outrage at the
devastating effects of expanded "salvage" logging during the past two
years, the referendum may have added some much needed teeth to the
Club's efforts to recast itself in more grassroots terms.
The mainstream environmental movement also played a more visible role
in the 1996 congressional elections than ever before. The League of
Conservation Voters targeted a dozen members of Congress for defeat,
highlighting their role in promoting a virulently anti-environmental
agenda. Of these, six were defeated in their re-election bids, most
significantly Larry Pressler of South Dakota, who was the only
incumbent U.S. Senator to be defeated in 1996. A seventh, Rep. Steve
Stockman of Texas, was defeated in a December runoff. The Sierra
Club spent ten times as much as ever before in support of pro-
environment candidates, a total of $7.5 million. However, such
efforts have proved far from sufficient to alter the terms of
environmental debate in official Washington circles. The most
noticeable result may have been to encourage candidates on both sides
of the issues to drape their campaigns in green cloth, advancing the
corporate greenwash by promoting environmental images over substance.
Bill Clinton's various high-profile environmental proclamations
during the campaign season-from Yellowstone Park to Utah to the
California redwoods-not only affirmed the trend toward image over
substance, but each featured measures to handsomely compensate
corporations for not fully exercising their "property rights" to
expand mining and timber cutting on corporate-owned lands. Last year,
the federal government offered trades of federal land with a combined
value of several hundred million dollars to mining companies in
Arizona, timber companies in the Northwest, and the Houston-based
conglomerate Maxxam, in exchange for the protection of a portion of
their California redwood forest holdings. A subsidiary of the
Canadian mining conglomerate Noranda was offered nearly $65 million
in federal property to withdraw its proposal for a massive gold
mining operation just north of Yellowstone National Park. The
Environmental Defense Fund, which has been the leading proponent of
an unabashedly "market-oriented" approach to environmentalism,
described tradeoffs of federal land as the best "source of revenue on
the horizon that is going to enable us to protect these sensitive
areas as quickly as we have to," according to the New York Times.
This despite a large reserve of unspent federal funds designated
specifically for conservation-related land purchases.
To challenge the hegemony of the voices of official environmentalism
on the national level will ultimately require more active and diverse
networks of grassroots activists, organized and coordinated from the
ground up. Such networks have begun to appear in the environmental
justice movement, as well as among grassroots forest activists.
Activists working on similar issues and facing an increasingly
unified corporate agenda need to find ways to join forces across
boundaries of geography, ethnicity, class, and specific-issue focus.
Local groups may have ties to several regional and national networks,
sometimes sharing legal and technical resources with larger, better-
funded organizations. However, it is essential that they retain the
prerogative to set their own agendas and speak to their own
communities' priorities, while steadfastly resisting the pressures of
cooptation that the existing larger organizations so frequently
succumb to-sometimes unwittingly but often with unabashed enthusiasm.
In 1995, the long-awaited 25th anniversary of Earth Day came and went
with considerably less fanfare than five years earlier. Controversies
over corporate contributions largely derailed plans for the biggest-
and the most utterly compromised-Earth Day ever. Earth Day organizers
hired a corporate public relations firm, Dorf & Stanton, to
coordinate program development and communications, and established a
short-lived "Earth Day Corporate Team" to actively solicit corporate
participation. The organization was rocked with dissent and underwent
two complete reorganizations before a revived Earth Day organization
raised $6.5 million in corporate contributions.
The official Earth Day 1995 petition, addressed with a puzzling
forthrightness to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, began, "With major
polluters such as Texaco and Monsanto attempting to 'sponsor' Earth
Day, and every politician in the nation claiming to be 'for the
environment,' it is getting hard to figure out who is really
protecting the planet and who is poisoning it." The corporate co
optation of Earth Day, an idea that provoked intense controversy in
1990, and brought hundreds of people to demonstrate on Wall Street,
had become conventional wisdom by mid-decade. Will activists in 1997
begin to chart a different path?
END
Tokar is a faculty member at Goddard College, has been active in
local environmental movements since the 1970s, and has written
extensively on ecology issues. This article is adapted from Brian
Tokar's Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate
Greenwash (South End Press).